Keeping Secrets (17 page)

‘Did I look worse?' Miriam asked.

‘A bit on the peaky side, I thought. Where's Jon, d'you want to come home for a cuppa?'

‘Haven't you got enough?'

‘More the merrier. Andrew,
stop
kicking Joshua! Stop it! Now get in the car, all of you, and behave yourselves. We've got Company. Like grown-ups, and manners, okay?'

Miriam and Jonathan squeezed into the front with Tess. ‘This is fun,' said Jonathan.

‘Have some crisps,' said Flora, easing out into the road. ‘I don't know if there's much else in the larder, I seem to be a bit behind.'

In her large, muddled kitchen, she and Miriam sat drinking tea from chipped mugs and eating jam sandwiches. ‘Miracle there's any bread left,' said Flora, who had booted the boys out into the garden where a climbing frame stood on scuffed grass. Tess barked, leaping up and down.

‘Now,' she said to Miriam. ‘I was talking about you to someone the other day, and describing your exquisite home, and she said she needed someone to run up some curtains, being hopeless, like me, on the domestic front, and I thought you might be just the ticket. I mean, is that an awful nerve? You might be sick to death of all that, and yearning to do a computer course. Has Stephen got a computer? Tom longs for one, but I've told him the boys would just take it over with war games, so he's holding off for a bit. Mind you, I suppose they ought to have one one day, we've all got to drag ourselves into the eighties somehow, haven't we? Are you going to let Jon have one?'

Miriam smiled, feeling better. ‘Don't know,' she said. ‘But curtains, yes. Why not? Who is she?'

That was the past; things were better now. Not right, but better. Running up a couple of curtains for someone Flora knew had grown, over two or three years, to taking the lease of a small shop in Woodburgh, selling and making up fabric of Miriam's choosing, selected on buying trips to factories and wholesalers. The window was hung with Liberty and Sanderson linens and cottons, bold swathes of green, purple and ochre, folds of harlequin, bolts of slubbed silk, soft cotton net woven with birds and flowers. Above the window, in gold on black, was Miriam's name – Stephen had organised that. It had been Stephen who found the shop, and who had encouraged her. Miriam thought he had done so mostly for his own sake, to save him from being saddled with a melancholic wife who drank, but she was pleased, and she enjoyed it.

Inside, the shop had shelves and display stands and a large, flat-topped desk pushed up against the wall. Above it was a cork board, pinned with swatches and price lists; on it were scissors and pinking shears, a telephone, large red diary and a brass measure nailed all along the edge, marked in metres. Here Miriam sat and took orders and measurements, doing some of the sewing herself in a small back room next to a patch of yard where cats slept in the sun. The rest she sent out, to local women with their own machines.

Someone else would have made much of all this. Someone else, more motivated, more ambitious, grown accustomed to running her own show and to being well known in the community, might have begun to speak loudly, authoritatively, to have strong opinions on local issues and hold forth at dinner parties. Another woman might have thought, after seven years, that it was time to open another branch, to break into Norwich. Miriam still disliked dinner parties, and had no desire to open another branch. And although she had an identity, now, to present to the world, and really felt she was, in part, who she appeared to be, she was, still, Miriam – uncertain, unsure of herself. She was confident in her work, she laid out alternatives, and made suggestions, trusting her taste, but she did not, deep down, think of it as proper work – pleasing, yes, to have helped make a house a home, but not really important, or worthwhile, any more than she was.

In a locked drawer of the flat-topped desk was a half-bottle of gin and a medicine glass. There was tonic in the workroom at the back, kept in the little fridge with the milk for tea and coffee. Miriam did not drink every day, at least she tried not to and didn't think she did, but she had to know it was there. Life had been like this for so many years that she had long since stopped remarking on it to herself, or wondering if she were overdoing it. Drinking, was, simply, as much a part of her now as her skin, or her voice, which people used to say was musical, although now, with the gin, it had become lower, sometimes a little hoarse. But no one had remarked on this: as far as she knew no one realised she drank. There were, in any case, plenty of people in the villages whose lives revolved around the pub. Miriam's drinking had nothing to do with pubs. Drinking alone was secret, special, the bottle and the glass the only things in the world to know what she was really like. At home, after the confrontation, Stephen and she had, after a while, had drink in the house again, but that was different – a glass of wine at dinner, nothing more. She had managed to make sure it was nothing more. Only when Stephen was away, down in London where he had a partner, now, James Diffey, and an office in Camden Town.

He was away quite a lot.

Miriam, on a spring morning, tidying up upstairs on her day off, stood looking absently out of the landing window at the woods across the lane. The trees, in late April, were still only just in leaf, and until last week the mornings had been damp and chilly, the tops of the branches threaded with mist. Spring came late here, much later than in London, where Stephen was going again at the end of the week, for a meeting. Occasionally, more than occasionally, Miriam wondered what else was down there for him other than work, and James and Klara's house in Kentish Town, where he stayed, always phoning; she never asked, and she didn't actually want to know. In the end, they had come to an accommodation – no more babies, that was openly agreed, and looked as if it were impossible anyway. No more talk of love – that was something unspoken, that just happened, her slow realisation that the word was never used by either of them. There were no quarrels, little more than irritations, and rarely that. They lived in the same house, eating at the same table, sleeping – rarely more than that – in the same bed. They talked about Stephen's work, and Miriam's work, and about Jonathan, for whom they had stayed together, and who was seventeen now.

Considering everything, he'd turned out all right. He might have been lonely, he might have been spoiled. He might have got into drugs, but as far as they knew he hadn't. Most of the time he was open and direct, an easy companion, and Miriam loved him as she had never been able to love Stephen, because she had not been allowed to. Jonathan was warm, interested in everything, funny. He was studying at the sixth form college for three A levels, wanting, unexpectedly, to read history, but he wasn't bogged down in it, and what he cared about more than anything in the world was his music. He was the one who could have done with a studio out in the garden, away from the house, to make as much noise as he liked. Instead, in summer he and his friends often listened out in the garage, and in winter he was indoors, long since moved from the little room at the back to the large one at the front where Stephen used to work. Miriam, turning now from thoughts of Stephen in London to Jonathan, and the postcard from Amsterdam, wondered what she would do if Marietta took it into her head to arrive here, unannounced. He'd given her his address, it must mean something.

She collected the sheets and pillowcases from his room and carried them downstairs; in the kitchen, she put them into the washing machine and sat down with a recipe book. Tess followed her in from the hall; she sat beside Miriam's chair, waiting for a walk.

‘What shall we have for supper, Tess?' She leafed through the pages. Jonathan, on the verge of vegetarianism, complained if they had meat every night. ‘Ratatouille?' She stroked Tess's head, mentally going through the shelves of the village shop, which was now a small Spar, run by Patels, and serving the housing development grown up around the outskirts. Fresh vegetables could be a problem on Mondays, but there were a couple of peppers in the fridge. ‘Okay, ratatouille and an apple tart. I'll just take these letters down to the studio and we'll be off, all right? Come for a walk to the shop?'

Tess got up stiffly, slowly wagging her tail. She followed Miriam out into the garden, down the path to the gap in the hedge, and round to the side of the studio. The grass was still damp from last night's rain, and the leaves of the honeysuckle and mock orange were wet; the letters in her hand, Miriam opened both halves of the white wooden door and stepped inside. Papers lifted a little with the intake of air; it was quiet as a church in here.

Bringing Stephen's post out was one of the things she always did on Mondays; during the rest of the week she had left for the shop before it arrived. It felt like a ritual, both a wifely thing to do and an acknowledgement that this was almost always the first place he came to at the end of the day, staying out here until supper, a sign that she had accepted this, though she didn't know if he noticed. She walked over to the long white desktop and dropped the letters on to it. And picked them up again, noticing properly for the first time that of the two with London postmarks one was handwritten, in a hand which looked like a woman's.

Miriam stood in the empty studio, tapping the envelope in her hand. She looked at the name and address again, written in a small, sure hand in black ink. It could have been a man, an academic, or a lawyer – there was something that reminded her of letters and signatures in the firm of solicitors where she once worked. The postmark was Highgate. She went over to the anglepoise and switched it on, tipping up the envelope so that the light shone through. Impossible to make out a word. But somehow she knew that this was not from a man, that although over the years she had seen countless handwritten letters from clients drop on to the mat with the type-written ones from builders and surveyors and county councils, this one was not from someone writing about a house.
Stephen Knowles …
How did this woman know Stephen? How well did she know him?

She put the letter back on the desk, with the others, on top. The daffodils in a jug she brought in last week were almost over, the petals dry and papery; she picked them up, and put them down again. She found herself pacing, past the drawing board, the plan chest, the filing cabinet, always locked. Why? From outside, through the open door, she could hear the garden full of birdsong; Tess was sniffing at familiar scents. She came to the doorway and looked in, wanting a walk.

‘Go away,' said Miriam, to Tess, and to whoever had written to her husband. Perhaps this woman had written before, perhaps there was a whole bundle of letters somewhere in here. She looked at the filing cabinet, hesitated, went over and tried it. Locked. The plan chest, which had no locks, contained plans. She stood behind Stephen's swivel chair, running her eye over the desk again. The phone, his typewriter, his diary, a box of pens, a dusting of pencil lead and shavings, an overflowing filing tray. Miriam sat on the chair and pulled the tray towards her.

She riffled uneasily through planning applications, letters from the district surveyor, builders'quotes and bills. There was months of correspondence here; what Stephen needed was a secretary. James had one in London. Who did Stephen have in London? She put the heap of papers back in the tray, and pushed it back against the wall, beneath the photographs of work in progress or completed: bare interiors, building sites. Stephen's diary, large and black, lay open by the phone; she leaned forward and went quickly through the pages: four months of meetings, on and off site, with nothing to indicate that he ever did anything but work. Perhaps it was true. She snapped it shut, remembered it had been open and pulled it quickly towards her, feeling ashamed and shaky. The diary fell, and a little piece of paper fluttered out; there was a bang as the diary hit the floor. Miriam bent down and picked it up.

The little piece of paper lay near; she picked that up, too, finding only a till-receipt: £35.60. For what? It was dated six weeks ago: had Stephen been in London then? She looked again through the diary: yes. He'd gone down for two days in February but the entry just said London, with a pencilled line – no note of a meeting, no client's name. Had he spent £35.60 on a meal? Who with? When he rang home, had he rung from James and Klara's, as he said, or from someone else's house? The receipt he would have kept for the tax man; he must have forgotten to file it. Miriam slipped it back between the pages and left-the diary on the desk. She swung round slowly in the swivel chair, thinking: I am being a fool. There is probably nothing to know, and if there is it's better I don't know it. I am going to take the dog for a walk and make a meal and wait until Jonathan and Stephen come home. We are all going to have supper together, and I am going to say nothing.

She got up, seeing for the first time Stephen's jacket, left hanging on the back of the door. He'd worn it yesterday when they all went walking over the fields to the pub in the next village, which did Sunday lunches. When they came back he'd come out here, to finish a drawing for a meeting in Norwich this morning.

I have been through my husband's papers and now I am going to go through his pockets, thought Miriam. The image was not a pretty one. She walked over the sunlit wooden floor, saying to herself: if there is something in there then at least I shall know. But there will be nothing, and I shall make myself forget this morning.

She felt in the left pocket, then the right, finding a handkerchief, money, keys. There was another receipt but that was from Spar, for £3.47. She pulled the jacket open, feeling in the inside pocket. Two pens, a book of stamps, another, inner pocket, with a zip. From inside it, Miriam brought out a little brown envelope, very worn, and tipped into her hand a photograph. She turned it over and found herself looking at the face of a woman with a sleek bob of dark hair, small, neat features, granny specs. She was unsmiling, as if she felt no need to ingratiate herself with the world; she looked clever and competent and calm and Miriam knew at once that she would write in exactly the small, black, academic hand she had seen on the envelope from Highgate. She took the photograph to the open doorway and looked at it again in the light, as if she could learn more about this woman there. She felt her knees trembling. Was this who Stephen wanted?